The absolute last thing I need is more books. I am drowning in books – they are piled up all over my room, and my TBR list is impossibly long. Yet, I am addicted to used bookstores and have a hard time exercising any willpower over used books. Any willpower.
There is a used bookstore downtown that I only visited for the first time about 6 months ago. I think that all of the books are donated, and most of the profits from the store go to charity (maybe homelessness?). Hardcover fiction is about $4 and paperbacks are $3. It's not in a particularly convenient location for me, but I've been having the urge to go there lately, so I stopped in today after a special visit to the downtown Trader Joe's.
I am proud of myself for leaving with only one book: The Uses of Enchantment by Heidi Julavits, which I bought in hardcover for $4.33 including tax. From Amazon:
On November 7, 1985, Mary Veal, 16, a not especially distinguished upper-middle-class girl, disappears from New England's Semmering Academy. A month later she reappears at Semmering, claiming amnesia, but hinting at abduction and ravishment. The events in Julavits's third, beautifully executed novel take place on three levels: one, dedicated to "what might have happened," is the story of the supposedly blank interval; another is dedicated to the inevitable therapeutic aftermath, as Mary's therapist, Dr. Hammer, tries to discover whether Mary is lying, either about the abduction or the amnesia; and the present of the novel, which revolves around the funeral of Mary's mother, Paula, in 1999. There, Mary feels not only the hostility of her sisters, Regina (an unsuccessful poet) and Gaby (a disheveled lesbian) but Paula's posthumous hostility. Or is that an illusion? This structure delicately balances between gothic and comic, allowing Julavits to play variations on Mary's life and on the '80s moral panic of repressed memory syndromes and wild fears of child abuse. While Julavits sometimes lets an overheated style distract from her central story, as its various layers coalesce, the mystery of what did happen to Mary Veal will enthrall the reader to the very last page.
But here's the danger of going into a bookstore without a list or having access to the internet: Amazon reviews have turned out to be pretty lukewarm, and I can't seem to find many blog reviews. Was this a bad purchase?
Has anyone out there read The Uses of Enchantment? Worth it?